Jack Kerouac Quotes & Sayings

It's hypocrisy of men makes these hills grim — Jack Kerouac

I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be. — Jack Kerouac

I wanted to go and get Rita again and tell her a lot more things, and really make love to her this time, and calm her fears about men. — Jack Kerouac

A man who allows wild passion to arise within, himself burns his heart, then after burning adds the wind that thereto which ignites the fire again, or not, as the case may be. — Jack Kerouac

And suddenly, not a soul's at the store as for other & similar & just as blank reasons, they've gone to the silence, the suppers of their own mystery. — Jack Kerouac

I'm right there, swimming the river of hardships but I know how to swim ... — Jack Kerouac

To make the sea your own, to watch over it, to brood your very soul into it, to accept it and love it as though only it mattered and existed. — Jack Kerouac

I never saw such crazy musicians. Everybody in Frisco blew. It was the end of the continent; they didn't give a damn. — Jack Kerouac

I was very rich now, a super myriad trillionaire in Samapatti transcendental graces, because of good humble karma, maybe because I had pitied the dog and forgiven men. But I knew now that I was a bliss heir, and that the final sin, the worst, is righteousness. So I would shut up and just hit the road and go see Japhy. — Jack Kerouac

I clearly saw the skeleton underneath
all this show of personality
what is left of a man
and all his pride but bones? — Jack Kerouac

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car at night? — Jack Kerouac

You guys are going somewhere or just going? — Jack Kerouac

Absolutely no way to escape enigmans. — Jack Kerouac

I know the secrets; I dig Joyce and Proust above Melville and Celine. — Jack Kerouac

Lissen Percepied do you believe in freedom?-then say what you want, it's poetry, poetry, all of it is poetry, great prose is poetry, great verse is poetry. — Jack Kerouac

She is giving me my life back and not claiming it for herself as so many of the women you love do claim. — Jack Kerouac

The most fantastic parking-lot attendant in the world, he can back a car forty miles an hour into a tight squeeze and stop at the wall, jump out, race among fenders, leap into another car, circle it fifty miles an hour in a narrow space, back swiftly into tight spot, hump, snap the car with the emergency so that you see it bounce as he flies out; then clear to the ticket shack, sprinting like a track star, hand a ticket, leap into a newly arrived car before the owner's half out, leap literally under him as he steps out, start the car with the door flapping, and roar off to the next available spot, arc, pop in, brake, out, run; working like that without pause eight hours a night, evening rush hours and after-theater rush hours, in greasy wino pants with a frayed fur-lined jacket and beat shoes that flap. — Jack Kerouac

Mankind will someday realize that we are actually in contact with the dead and with the other world, whatever it is; right now we could predict, if we only exerted enough mental will, what is going to happen within the next hundred years and be able to take steps to avoid all kinds of catastrophes. When a man dies he undergoes a mutation in his brain that we know nothing about now but which will be very clear someday if scientists get on the ball. The bastards right now are only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world. — Jack Kerouac

Lonely as America, a throatpierced sound in the night. — Jack Kerouac

Fear life but don't die, your alone, everybody's alone, oh Cody Pomeray you can't win you can't lose all is ephemeral all is hurt — Jack Kerouac

I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream-grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City. — Jack Kerouac

O sweetheart and okay
Here's hopin we'll all be away
It was great fun
But it was just one a
those tings — Jack Kerouac

In the hall itself the din of the music - for this is the real way to play a jukebox and what it was originally for - was so tremendous that it shattered Dean and Stan and me for a moment in the realization that we had never dared to play music as we wanted, and this was how loud we wanted. — Jack Kerouac

Hateful bitch of a world, it wouldn't ever last. — Jack Kerouac

Istory is best explained dramatically, because for God's sake nobody's going to tell me that massive Homeric war so to speak, between the Achaens and the Iliums was caused merely by some economic factor concerning trade ... — Jack Kerouac

What are you going to do with yourself, Ed?" I asked. "I don't know," he said. "I just go along. I dig life. — Jack Kerouac

Smith, I distrust any kind of Buddhism or any kinda philosophy or social system that puts down sex said Japhy (Gary Snyder) — Jack Kerouac

People change, they eat meals year after year and change with every meal. — Jack Kerouac

And I dreamed of a home long ago in New England, my little kitkats trying to go a thousand miles following me on the road across America, and my mother with a pack on her back, and my father running after the ephemeral uncatchable train, and I dreamed and woke up to a gray dawn, saw it, sniffed (because I had seen all the horizon shift as if a sceneshifter had hurried to put it back in place and make me believe in its reality), and went back to sleep, turning over. "It's all the same thing," I heard my voice say in the void that's highly embraceable during sleep. — Jack Kerouac

Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition, — Jack Kerouac

And when the fog's over and the stars and the moon come out at night it'll be a beautiful sight. — Jack Kerouac

Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. — Jack Kerouac

For you are an observer, you know, you observe things, that's why you live. — Jack Kerouac

Eager for bread and love. — Jack Kerouac

I wish the whole world was dead serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives using everybody's food money to blow their heads off anyway. — Jack Kerouac

-no girl had ever moved me with a story of spiritual suffering and so beautifully her soul showing out radiant as an angel wandering in hell and the hell the selfsame streets I'd roamed in watching, watching for someone just like her and never dreaming the darkness and the mystery and eventuality of our meeting in eternity ... — Jack Kerouac

beautiful insane
in the rain — Jack Kerouac

LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities. — Jack Kerouac

I liked him; not because he was a good sort, as he later proved to be, but because he was enthusiastic about things. — Jack Kerouac

... the way to the bottom of South America where the Indians are seven feet tall and eat cocaine on the mountainside? — Jack Kerouac

I am not 'I am' but just a spy in somebody's body. — Jack Kerouac

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious. — Jack Kerouac

They build their own Hells. — Jack Kerouac

I had nothing to offer anyone except my own confusion. — Jack Kerouac

Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious. — Jack Kerouac

What is the universe
but a lot of waves
And a craving desire
is a wave ... — Jack Kerouac

I nudged myself closer to the ledge and closed my eyes and thought 'Oh what a life this is, why do we have to be born in the first place, and only so we can have our poor gentle flesh laid out to such impossible horrors as huge mountains and rock and empty space,' and with horror I remembered the famous Zen saying, 'When you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing.' The saying made my hair stand on end; it had been such cute poetry sitting on Alvah's straw mats. — Jack Kerouac

In these cases, the mind knows what it's doing better than the guile, because the mind flows, the guile dams up, that is, the mind stride but the guile limps. And that's no guileless statement, however, and that's no Harvard like, as MIT will measure soon with computers and docks of Martian data. — Jack Kerouac

Everything belongs to me because I am poor. — Jack Kerouac

Life is life, and kind is kind — Jack Kerouac

No time for poetry but exactly what is. — Jack Kerouac

Bein Crazy
is the least of my worries. — Jack Kerouac

Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much. — Jack Kerouac

You know when i was a little kid in oregon i didn't feel that i was and american at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values but and when i discovered buddhism and all i suddenly felt that i had lived in a previous lifetime innumerable ages ago and now because of the faults and sins in that lifetime i was being degraded to a more grievous domain of existence and my karma was to be born in america where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom. — Jack Kerouac

Sometimes I'd yell questions at the rocks and trees, and across gorges, or yodel - "What is the meaning of the void?" The answer was perfect silence, so I knew. — Jack Kerouac

I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility. — Jack Kerouac

O how wonderful life is, how miraculous, God made this and God made that", "how do you know he doesn't hate what He did: He might even be drunk and not noticing what he went and done tho of course that's not true — Jack Kerouac

Now a door slams. The kids have rushed out for the last play, the mothers are planning and slamming in kitchens, you can hear it out in swish leaf orchards, on popcorn swings, in the million-foliaged sweet wafted night of sighs, songs, shushes. A thousand things up and down the street, deep, lovely, dangerous, aureating, breathing, throbbing like stars; a whistle, a faint yell; the flow of lowell over rooftops beyond; the bark on the river, the wild goose of the night yakking, ducking in the sand and sparkle; the ululating lap and purl and lovely mystery on the shore, dark, always dark the river's cunning unseen lips murmuring kisses, eating night, stealing sand, sneaky. — Jack Kerouac

Now she is cuddling and kissing me all over and ... Cody walks right in just as we're cooing (or haved cooed again) on the bed and he yells our Ah just what I like to see in the morning, boys and girls! — Jack Kerouac

Because he was always tremendously generated towards complete relationship with his women to the point where they ended up in one convoluted octopus mess of souls and tears and fellatio and hotel room schemes and rubbing in and out of cars and doors and great crises in the middle of the night ... (p. 128) — Jack Kerouac

One fast move or I'm gone,' I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can't learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimisn you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with - — Jack Kerouac

I didn't know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being. — Jack Kerouac

I remember him standing under a streetlamp.
'Just as we passed that other lamp I was going to tell you a further thing, Sal, but now I am parenthetically continuing with a new thought and by the time we reach the next I'll return to the original subject, agreed?'
I certainly agreed. — Jack Kerouac

That looks like a tree, let's call it a tree,' said Coyote to Earthmaker at the beginning, and they walked around the rootdrinker patting their bellies. — Jack Kerouac

Dreaming: the phantom of self-illusion emanating visions that change every night
Living: the phantom of universal self-illusion emanating the huge vision of the world that takes millenniums to change — Jack Kerouac

Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other." To the children and the innocent it's all the same. — Jack Kerouac

All I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country. — Jack Kerouac

Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance. — Jack Kerouac

I have nothing to offer anybody expect my own confusion. — Jack Kerouac

[ ... ] the point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE ... — Jack Kerouac

I didn't dictate sections of 'Visions of Cody'. I typed up a segment of taped conversation with Neal Cassady, or Cody, talking about his early adventures in L.A. It's four chapters. — Jack Kerouac

Who can leap the world's ties and sit with me among white clouds? — Jack Kerouac

I want to marry a girl," I told them, "so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old. — Jack Kerouac

Poor examples because of mechanical needs of typing, of the flow of river sounds, words, dark, leading to the future and attesting to the madness, hollowness, ring and roar of my mind which blessed or unblessed is where trees sing
in a funny wind
well-being believes he'll go to heaven
a word to the wise is enough
'Smart went Crazy — Jack Kerouac

After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him. — Jack Kerouac

I have fallen in love with you,God. — Jack Kerouac

I actually got so drunk I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl of the Scollay Square Cafe and got pissed and puked on all night long by a thousand sailors and seamen and when I woke up in the morning and found myself all covered and caked and unspeakably dirty I just like a good old Boston man walked down to the Atlantic Avenue docks and jumped into the sea. — Jack Kerouac

If all the world were green, there would be no such thing as the color green. Similarly, men cannot know what it is to be together without otherwise knowing what it is to be apart. If all the world were love, then, how could love exist? This is why we turn away from each other on moments of great happiness and closeness. How can we know happiness and closeness without contrasting them, like lights? — Jack Kerouac

And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves. — Jack Kerouac

And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all. — Jack Kerouac

As early pioneers in the knowing, that when you lose your reason, you attain highest perfect knowing. — Jack Kerouac

I wandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was, Frisco - long, bleak streets with trolley wires all shrouded in fog and whiteness. I stumbled around a few blocks. Weird bums (Mission and Third) asked me for dimes in the dawn. — Jack Kerouac

But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars... — Jack Kerouac

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself. — Jack Kerouac

No bitter complaints about society whatever from this grand and ideal man who really loves me moreover as if I deserve it, but I'm bursting to explain everything to him, not even Big Sur but the past several years, but there's no chance with everybody yakking
And in fact I can see in Cody's eyes that he can see in my own eyes the regret we both feel that recently we haven't had chances to talk whatever, like we used to do driving across America and back in the old road days, too many people now want to talk to us and tell us their stories, we've been hemmed in and surrounded and outnumbered
The circle's closed in on the old heroes of the night
— Jack Kerouac

John Clellon Holmes ... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!' — Jack Kerouac

Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub. — Jack Kerouac

Terplash, & what difference make! One little white spark of light! Hair woven hands Penelope seaboat smeller

Is Virgin you trying to fathom me Tiresome old sea, aint you sick & tired of all of this merde? this incessant boom boom & sand walk — Jack Kerouac

Can't you just see all those enlightened monkey men sitting around a roaring woodfire around their Buddha saying nothing and knowing everything? — Jack Kerouac

Be in love with yr life — Jack Kerouac

The little flowers grew everywhere around the rocks, and no one had asked them to grow, or me to grow. — Jack Kerouac

My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad. — Jack Kerouac

I was getting drunk and didn't care; everything was fine — Jack Kerouac

The words are clear as in the reflection of the world on the water. Therefore write the Word at once, everywhere, from now till your hand is paralyzed, for THERE will be your work for GOD, since you can not work for God in other ways, and would not, & don't know how, or bend that way, from habit, & from talent in the use & signification & arrangement of the Word. — Jack Kerouac

I am an appearance
The world is an appearance
The bread I eat is an appearance
All wish't forth from Mind Essence
Due to Ignorance
I don't have to exist
I don't exist, I do exist
Who cares?
For the purposes of this world
Do nothing
Or do everything anyhow. — Jack Kerouac

Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child. — Jack Kerouac

And I go home having lost her love.
And write this book. — Jack Kerouac

I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness. — Jack Kerouac

Pretty soon ... do you realize there'll be so many additional childhoods and pasts with everybody writing about them everybody'll give up reading in despair-There'll be an Explosion of childhoods and pasts, they'll have to have a giant Brain print them out microscopically on film to be stored in a warehouse on Mars to give Heaven Seventy Kotis to catch up on all that reading- Seventy Million Million Kotis! - Whoopee! - Everything is free! — Jack Kerouac

I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was 'Wow! — Jack Kerouac